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Luzerne tech chief: Election web crash won't happen again

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That's the pledge from Luzerne County's technology chief, who said Wednesday a series of planned upgrades will prevent the kind of system overload that crippled the county website after the polls closed in Tuesday's primary election.

Election workers were blocked from posting results to the site and a fraction of visitors received a jumbled error message caused by the database malfunction.

The outage forced reporters, candidates and others interested in real-time results to the rotunda of the county courthouse in Wilkes-Barre to watch a scroll of results until the website eventually returned to service with full vote tallies around 10:30 p.m.

The planned upgrades, including a reconfiguration of the site's architecture and a modernization of the database system, will enable it to continue running smoothly when traffic increases exponentially, Englot said.

Those upgrades, Englot said, are not expected to carry additional costs. The Apache and PHP software used on the website is open source. Programming and reconfiguration services are included in the county's agreement with its hosting service. For 2013, Englot said, that service and technical support will cost the county $3,216.

"The performance improvements that we'll be making to the website will allow it to handle higher degrees of activity like those experienced last night," Englot said Wednesday.

The number of visits to the site Tuesday night - about 50,000 hits between 8 and 10 p.m. - mirrored the volume during a November general election, but may have come in stronger waves, Englot said. The database reached its capacity for simultaneous connections at 8:47 p.m. and remained in critical territory for an hour, he said.

"The timing and distribution of the requests must have been just different enough to push it over the edge," Englot said in an email relaying the diagnosis from the hosting service, Software Engineering Associates of Archbald.

County Councilman Stephen J. Urban, who works in the information technology field, questioned that explanation. He remained at the courthouse most of the night Tuesday, watching results and huddling with David Parsnik, the head of the county division that includes the election bureau.

"I would assume during a presidential race, there are probably more than 2,000 simultaneous requests trying to hit the county election results site," Urban said. "Why would the county site have a problem processing requests all of a sudden during this primary and not last year during a more robust general election cycle?"

Tucker Hottes, the technology development manager for interactive media at Times-Shamrock Communications, said the volume of traffic and connections to the website's database did not appear especially high but could have been exacerbated by software errors.

"Typically, software is written in such a way to protect databases from becoming overloaded," Hottes said. "If the software isn't written properly, and connections remain open, even if someone is just looking at a static page and not refreshing, they can be 'using' one of those connections."

Incidentally, Englot said, the highest traffic volume to the county website during the overload Tuesday night came from a Times-Shamrock server used by The Citizens' Voice and Scranton Times-Tribune. Reporters and editors from those newspapers were frequently refreshing the county results page looking for updated vote tallies, Edward Pikulski, the company's digital audience director, said.

"It is a very easy task for us to 'hammer' them with 2,000 hits in two hours," Pikulski said. "At 1,000 hits an hour and let's say 50 people or maybe more between the (Voice and Times) newsrooms refreshing the site, it's about 20 refreshes an hour, or one every three minutes per person."

Board of Elections chairman H. Jeremy Packard said the elections bureau will email election results to the news media in the future if the county website encounters problems again. Bureau director Marisa Crispell said the bureau is working on a backup plan to ensure results are distributed if the website crashes in the future.

Late last night, the bureau ended the delay in getting election results to the media by providing The Citizens' Voice results on a computer data drive and later emailed results to the Times Leader, Packard said. The bureau did not provide election results to television stations, Packard said.

"They were ticked off about that," Packard said. "The TV people were yelling and screaming late in the game."

Democratic strategist Ed Mitchell said the delay to provide election results to the media was "an epic failure," noting television crawls Tuesday night had Lackawanna County results but none from Luzerne County.

msisak@citizensvoice.com mbuffer@citizensvoice.com

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